One interesting American thing (a technical term, meaning a moment or event, a text, a controversy, an idea, a figure, or whatevertheheckelse I think of) per day, from Ben Railton, a professor of American literature, culture, history, and, natch, Studies.

MyAmericanFuture

MyAmericanFuture

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

May 9, 2017: The Scholars Strategy Network and Me: Online Writing

[Last week, I
had the chance to attend a national meeting of the Scholars Strategy Network, a
vital public scholarly organization of which I’ve been a
Member for almost four years. So this week I wanted to share a few sides to
my work with SSN, leading up to a weekend post on that national meeting and
SSN’s expanding role in Trump’s America!]

On SSN and the
moment that changed everything in my career.

As of November
2010, the same month when I
began this blog, I began trying to write op ed pieces for newspapers on
histories that I believed were missing from contemporary debates over issues
like immigration and diversity in America. Over the next four years I drafted
and re-drafted a number of such pieces, waiting for moments when the particular
issue would rise to the top of the news cycle once again and then sending the
pieces out to various newspapers’ op ed pages. I apologize to any editors if
I’m forgetting them, but as best I can remember I not only never got any of
those op eds published (that I know for sure), but also never received a reply
of any kind to any of those submissions (other than the automatic form-reply sent
upon initial submission). While I didn’t entirely give up on the possibility
(indeed, I kept revising and re-sending the pieces when suitable occasions
arose), I have to admit that it started to feel like a minor and largely
quixotic pursuit within the overall frame of my career, a way to pretend (I
wouldn’t have used that particular word at the time, but I’m trying to reflect
as honestly as I can) that I was aiming for public scholarly connections and
audience beyond those that this blog or my books or other publications could
reach.

There’s a lot
that I could say about that moment and what it meant for me, but I think my
main takeaway would have to be that it, and thus Avi and SSN, helped me realize
for the first time the unique and vital role that short-form
online writing can play in a 21st century public scholarly
career. Despite my four years of blogging experience, I had mostly to that
point been thinking about op eds as shorter versions of my other print
publications, and thus had been sending them to print media like newspapers. For
TPM, and with Avi’s help (as well as that of Nona Willis Aronowitz [especially] and David Kurtz, the
TPM editors with whom I worked during my tenure there), I began to think about
online public scholarly pieces as their own genre, one somewhat parallel to
posts on this blog but with a voice, style, and emphasis on audience engagement
all their own. Moreover, those evolutions in my voice and style became
significant parts of my
most recent book and, even more so, the book
on exclusion and inclusion that I’m beginning now. To put it bluntly, I don’t
know that any aspects of my public scholarly career over the last 2.5 years
would have been possible without SSN and that TPM link—and I know that they
would have been greatly impoverished at the very least.

Next SSN post
tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on SSN, or other organizations or efforts you’d highlight?

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#NoConfederateSyllabus

In response to the controversy over HBO's proposed show Confederate, Matthew Teutsch and I have collaborated on #NoConfederateSyllabus, a Google Doc that you all can contribute to as well. Check out an intro here: